The American Boy. Andrew Taylor

5th October, I travelled up to London. Young Allan sat as far away as possible from me in the coach and replied in monosyllables to the questions I put to him. I delivered the boy into the care of a servant at his parents’ house. I had taken but a few steps along the pavement when I felt a hand on my sleeve. I stopped and turned.

      ‘Your pardon, sir.’

      A tall man in a shabby green coat inclined his trunk forward from the waist. He wore a greasy wig, thick blue spectacles and a spreading beard like the nest of an untidy bird.

      ‘I am looking – looking for the residence of an acquaintance.’ He had a low, booming voice, the sort that makes glasses vibrate. ‘An American gentleman – a Mr Allan. I wonder whether that might be his house.’

      ‘It is indeed.’

      ‘Ah – you are most obliging, sir – so the boy you were with must be his son?’ He swayed as he spoke. ‘A handsome boy.’

      I bowed. The man’s face was turned away from me but his breath smelt faintly of spirits and strongly of rotting teeth or an infection of the gums. He was not intoxicated, though, or rather not so it affected his actions. I thought he was perhaps the sort of man who is at his most sober when a little elevated.

      ‘Mr Shield, sir!’

      I turned back to the Allans’ house. The servant had opened the door.

      ‘There was a message from Mrs Allan, sir. She wishes to keep Master Edgar until tomorrow. Mr Allan’s clerk will bring him back to Stoke Newington in the morning.’

      ‘Very good,’ I said. ‘I will inform Mr Bransby.’

      Without a word of farewell, the man in the green coat walked rapidly in the direction of Holborn. I followed, for my next destination was beyond it, at Lincoln’s Inn. The man glanced over his shoulder, saw me strolling behind him and began to walk more quickly. He knocked against a woman selling baskets and she shrieked abuse at him, which he ignored. He turned into Vernon-row. By the time I reached the corner, there was no sign of him.

      I thought perhaps the man in the green coat had mistaken me, or someone behind me, for a creditor. Or he had accelerated his pace for quite a different reason, unconnected with his looking back. I dismissed him from my mind and continued to walk southwards. But the incident lodged itself in my memory, and later I was to be thankful that it had.

      At Mr Rowsell’s chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, his clerk had the papers ready for me to sign. But as I was about to take my leave, the lawyer himself came out of his private room and shook me by the hand with unexpected cordiality.

      ‘I give you joy of your inheritance. You are somewhat changed, Mr Shield, if I may say so without impertinence. And for the better.’

      ‘Thank you, sir.’

      ‘A new coat, I fancy? You have begun to spend your new wealth?’

      I smiled at Mr Rowsell, responding to the good humour in his face rather than the words. ‘I have not touched my aunt’s money yet.’

      ‘What will you do with it?’

      ‘I shall place it in a bank for a few months. I do not wish to rush into a venture I might later regret.’ I hesitated, then added upon impulse: ‘My employer Mr Bransby happened to mention that Wavenhoe’s is a sound concern.’

      ‘Wavenhoe’s, eh?’ Rowsell shrugged. ‘They have a good name, it is true, but lately there have been rumours – not that that means anything; the City is a perfect rumour mill, you understand, turning ceaselessly, grinding yesterday’s idle speculations into tomorrow’s facts. Mr Wavenhoe himself is an old man, and they say he delegates much of the day-to-day business of the bank to his partners.’

      ‘And that is a cause of unease?’

      ‘Not exactly. But the City does not like change, it may be no more than that. And if Mr Wavenhoe retires, or even dies, his absence may have an effect on confidence in the bank. That is no reflection on the bank itself necessarily, merely on human nature. If you wish, I shall make some inquiries on your behalf.’

      I dined at an ordinary among plump lawyers and skinny clerks. My business had taken longer than I had anticipated, and I resolved to postpone my visit to Mrs Jem in Gaunt-court. After dinner, comfortable with beef and beer, I made my way up Southampton-row, passing the Allans’ house. It was a fine autumn afternoon. With my new coat, my new position and my new fortune, I felt I had become a different Tom Shield altogether from the one I had been less than a month before.

      As I walked, I observed the passers-by – chiefly the women. My eyes clung to a face beneath a bonnet, a pretty foot peeping beneath the hem of a dress, the curve of a forearm, the swell of a breast, a pair of bright eyes. I heard their laughter, their whispers. I smelt their perfume. Dear God, I was like a boy with his face pressed against the pastry-cook’s window.

      One struck me in particular, a tall woman with black hair, a high colour, and a fine full figure; as she climbed into a hackney I thought for an instant that she was Fanny, the girl I had once known, not as she had been then but as she might have become; and for a moment or two a cloud covered my happiness.

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      THE FRANTS’ HOUSE was on the south side of Russell-square. I rang the bell and waited. The brass plate sparkled. The paint was new. If a surface could be polished, it had been polished. If it could be scrubbed, it had been scrubbed.

      A manservant answered the door, a tall fellow with a fleshy, hook-nosed face. I told him my name and business, and he left me to kick my heels in a big dining room overlooking the square. I walked over to the window and stared down at the square garden. The curtains were striped silk, cream and green, and the green seemed to have been chosen to match exactly the grass outside.

      The door opened, and I turned to see Mr Henry Frant. As I did so, I looked for the first time at the wall beside the door, which was opposite the window. A portrait hung there, Mrs Frant to the life, sitting in a park with a tiny boy leaning against her knee and a spaniel stretched on the ground at her feet. In the distance was a prospect of a large stone-built mansion-house.

      ‘You’re Mr Bransby’s usher, I collect?’ Frant walked quickly towards me, his left hand in his pocket, bringing with him a scent of lavender water. He was the man I had seen at the carriage window in Ermine-street. ‘The boy will be down in a moment.’

      There was no sign of recognition on his face. I was too insignificant for him to have remembered me, of course, but it was also possible to believe that my own appearance had changed in the last month. Frant made no move to shake hands; nor was there an offer of refreshment or even a chair. There was an air of excitement about him, of absorption in his own affairs.

      ‘The boy has milksop tendencies, fostered by his mother,’ he announced. ‘I particularly desire that these traits be eradicated.’

      I bowed. In the portrait, Mrs Frant’s small white hand toyed with a brown ringlet that had escaped the confines of her bonnet.

      ‘He is not to be indulged, do you hear? He has had enough of that already. But now he is grown too old for the softness of women. It is time for him to learn to be a man. Behaving like a blushing maiden will be no good to him when he goes to Westminster. That is one reason why I have determined to send him to Mr Bransby’s.’

      ‘So he has never been to school before, sir?’

      ‘He has had tutors at home.’ Frant waved his right hand as though pushing them away, and the great signet ring on his forefinger gleamed as it caught the light from the window. ‘He does well enough at his books. Now it is time for him to learn something equally useful: how to deal with his fellows. But I will not detain you any longer. Pray give my compliments to Mr Bransby.’

      Before I could manage even another bow, Frant was out of the room, the door snapping shut behind him. I envied him: here was